§ 16. Sealey on Sartre as Husserl’s interpreter
We now arrive at the first possible point of contention that I would raise against the account of Kris Sealey. In her book, she proposes to label Sartre’s approach to transcendence as transcendence-as-intentionality. However, she also writes that “Sartre works to distance his exposition from Husserl’s epoché, claiming that it is both unfounded by, and unnecessary for the deployment of Husserl’s phenomenological method. More importantly, he finds the epoché to be that moment of Husserl’s corpus in which he undermines what is of most value in his claim concerning the structure of intentionality.”83 This claim makes very good sense when we take Sartre’s own proclamations from The transcendence of the Ego – where he makes this case himself – for their face value (and I will return to them in detail later). But what if we were to “bracket”
Sartre’s own explicit proclamations for a moment and look and the “thing itself”? What if we could prove that several years after his stay in Berlin, and approximately two years after the publication of Being and Nothingness, he still employed similar way of reasoning as the one we just described from Husserl’s perspective? If the epoché executed by Husserl leads to the purified cogitationes as a new field of data to work with, and if Sartre utilizes this “result” for his own ends, wouldn’t it imply that he has to presuppose the execution of the reduction in the first place?
According to Sealey, Sartre can be depicted as somebody influenced by Husserl to a great degree. She states that “[…] the shape of Sartre’s existential phenomenology is very much indebted to this way of understanding Husserl. For this reason, the work in this chapter, and in those that follow, assumes a certain legitimacy to Sartre’s appropriation of Husserl, but only for the sake of appreciating those Sartrean positions on the freedom and transcendence of consciousness.”84 That understanding of Husserl then refers to an interpretation according to which the “reduction fails to explain why the world experienced is precisely this world, and not otherwise” (specifically in Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness).85 However, I
83 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 15.
84 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 16.
85 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 16.
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would argue that one can find quite explicit responses to the question raised at the end of previous paragraph, responses that could seriously scrutinize this interpretation. I would also argue that the careful lecture of Sartre actually provides examples bearing witness to the fact that while Sartre rejected some aspects of the reduction and the bigger part of the bulk of Husserl’s methodological analyses, he was actually using some arguments and insights of Husserl’s against its own kin, similarly like a hypothetical “autoimmune disorder” would when infecting the field of Husserl’s own thought.
§ 17. Sartre on Descartes’s misunderstanding of cogito
To introduce how Sartre critically absorbs the notion cogito and how is he different in handling of it (in regards to both Descartes and Husserl), I will utilize Sartre’s text entitled Self- consciousness and Self-knowledge.86 The reasons for this choice are multiple. First, it is arguably the most explicit text that Sartre dedicated to the term cogito (and to the critique of its function in the thought of Descartes and Husserl). Second, it is based on Sartre’s original lecture for French society for philosophy from 194787 and as a result, it is a source often left alone in the shade of the much more popular Being and nothingness88, a work from 1943, consensually considered his magnum opus. Thanks to the selection of the text, we will be able not only to see how Sartre deals with the notion cogito but also explore how Sartre’s thought developed after the end of World War II and to what extent he remains loyal to the philosophical positions of his more famous and earlier works at the same time.89 As was the case with the reconstruction of Husserl’s connection of Descartes, I will not employ a historical approach as it would very likely force me to select another set of texts to work with. Instead, I will present an approach more interested in the thematic
86 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », La Transcendance de l’Ego et autres textes phénoménologiques. Vrin (Paris, 2000), pp. 133-165.
87 Published a year after in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 42, april – june (3), 1948.
88 SARTRE, Jean-Paul: L'être et le néant. Gallimard (Paris, 1943).
89 Apart from Being and Nothingness, I refer most notably to The Transcendence of the Ego: SARTRE, Jean-Paul: La Transcendance de l'ego. Vrin (Paris, 1966).
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connections to hopefully present an interpretation not directly opposing, but rather complementary to that of Sealey.
The most essential thought and cornerstone of this text is a statement that for Sartre, cogito is a philosophical starting point.90 Even though he does not arrive at this conclusion in a series of arguments like both Descartes and Husserl did before him and rather starts analyzing it right from the get go, we can still see this text as sharing one very important aspect with both philosophers mentioned previously. This refers to the setting in which the notion at hand represents also a methodological perspective. Seizing and analyzing the notion of cogito enables specific problematic for us to arise and consequently, it serves as a focus point through which we can address the problem itself. Once we progress to an actual content of this (at this point still formal) conception, we will unravel considerable differences in Sartre’s take on the matter compared to what we have seen in two previous steps (“performed” by Descartes and Husserl).
Like Husserl, Sartre dismisses Descartes’s substantialism but remains more reserved in his critique, specifically by focusing explicitly on what is “usually described” as Descartes’s thought.
Sartre leaves unanswered the question whether it is justified, in other words whether it indeed corresponds to what Descartes really had in mind. According to Sartre, it is not definitively proven and as such it remains open.91 He mentions “usual objections” raised against the father of Cartesianism, which can be, according to Sartre, summarized by statement that Descartes used for his cogito a notion of being which was actually the same he used for both the material things and for the spirit.92 In the following step, Sartre presumably identifies the core of Descartes’s position to be contained in a statement that to be (a substance) means to be an object of cognition. With this argument, he apparently follows up on his first publicly known philosophical text – Transcendence of the ego that deals in great detail with Descartes’s statement “I think therefore I am” (which we will address more elaborately in Chapter IV.). This proclamation serves as the starting point even here and Sartre, very much in accordance with this earlier text, claims that Descartes is actually “performing” more then he admits in this famous formula. His main argument is the following: What really happens is not that subject “thinks” (albeit in this very
90 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 138.
91 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 141.
92 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 141.
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moment subject is not established as subject yet), but rather that he gets to know, or more bluntly that he knows, that he thinks – thus he realizes it. According to Sartre, Descartes unjustly (non- adequately) describes what actually happens when the meditating subject comes to the conclusion
“I think, therefore I am.” As I will address later in greater detail, Sartre’s main objection is centered around his observation that thinking does not have to be always accompanied by reflection.
§ 18. Sartre’s attempt to “rescue” cogito from Descartes and Husserl
As we had a chance to see, Sartre deems appropriate and accurate description of what “is happening” as necessary for any sort of progress regarding the next arguments, and he also turns his attention to Husserl whom he criticizes for staying at the level of mere description.93 We ought to note here that Husserl himself would hardly take this objections as something negative, especially when we consider that at this stage of his career, he announces his aim to remain on the level of description as one of the main program-phrases of his phenomenological enterprise.94 Nevertheless, even on the level of description, Husserl, according to Sartre, arrives at a dead end when he reaches what Sartre calls a “pointillism of essences” – by operating with the notion of cogito in a manner which causes him to find essences in the unity of each perceptive act and disregard their mutual relation.95 The third target of Sartre’s critique is ἐποχή itself, which Husserl employs to avoid the real “metaphysical, ontological problem” – meaning the very question of the nature of being of consciousness. Although he does not fall into the same pitfall as Descartes by
93 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 140.
94 Cf. “Now phenomenology is, in fact, a purely descriptive discipline […].” HUSSERL, Edmund: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kerstern, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (Hague, 1983). P. 136. Based on an offer by journal Kaizo (Renewal in English), Husserl nevertheless (as early as in the twenties) authored series of five articles, three of which have the word renewal in their title and the remaining two share this topic in their content. They can be considered an adumbration of Husserl’s turn from “mere description” known from the later stages of his productive life. All of those articles were published later in: HUSSERL, Edmund: Gesammelte Werke, Aufsätze und Vorträge 1922-1937. Ed. Thomas Nenon a Hans Rainer Sepp, Hua XXVII, Springer (Dordrecht, 1989).
95 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 140.
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successfully avoiding his “leap” into substantialism, he does so only by leaping elsewhere, this time into idealism.96 We saw that for Sealey, this was the main point of divergence between Husserl and Sartre. However, as I try to explain, Husserl utilizes ἐποχή to arrive to a point where he can treat cogito as appropriately based evidence – something which Sartre happily does as well, but without addressing the need of elaborating the methodology needed to access it. I will return to this issue again later. At this point, I will only mention that for Sartre, the response lies in his conception of contingency. However, without performing some sort of reduction (at this stage of our analyses), it is impossible to operate with the notion of cogito – something Sartre does without any hesitation that it might be unjustified (without the proper grounding).
For the sake of the current line of argumentation, let us maintain the trajectory of Sartre’s reasoning – he currently stands before the following question: How to, regarding the question of being of the world, get out of the chain of doubt without the need to apply the ontological proof of the existence of god like Descartes or, like Husserl, to execute the phenomenological ἐποχή, and by doing so avoid the question completely.97 Unless we modify the meaning of the notion to a great degree, we will, according to Sartre, run into problems not only in regards to the question of the world, but also concerning a question of the being of the other (which is the topic we are principally after):
« […] le « cogito » cartésien lui découvre sa propre pensée, ne lui découvre nullement l’existence de l’autre. Je sais il lui découvre l’autre sous l’aspect de Dieu, et en un sens on peut dire que Dieu est l’autre poussé à l’absolu. Mais il est bien évident que le rapport direct et immédiat de moi avec l’autre n'implique pas nécessairement le passage à l’absolu, non pas parce que peut-être la philosophie ne peut pas s’appuyer sur Dieu pour prouver l’autre, mais essentiellement parce que ma croyance, où plutôt ma certitude de l’existence de l’autre est immédiate, est une donnée immédiate de ma vie, et qu’elle n’implique en aucun cas un recours à Dieu. »98
At this point, the most important objection raised against Descartes is that he is basing the certainty of the existence of the other through the divine assurance, and this makes our certainty
96 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », pp. 141-142.
97 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 142.
98 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 142.
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about the other absolute in the same way as is (absolute) the certainty of the subject about himself.
Meanwhile, it speaks against Husserl that the other serves only as a unity of meaning in his conception. Sartre even claims that if it can be put that way, he serves as a category that along with our subjective categories constitute the world.99 Any perceived physical object should in this regard be referring in the same manner to a subject as it is to another (human being) and potentially a third (in the sense of sociality100), and generally speaking the other hence plays the role of a structure through which we grasp (seize) the world. This conception, Sartre says, leads Husserl to proclaim the other as being no more and also no less probable than the empirical ego of the meditating subject, which is itself constituted by the transcendental consciousness.101 In Sartre’s view, Husserl remained too much of an idealist by executing the reduction and thus avoiding the question that Sartre considers to be cardinal one – the problem of being of consciousness.
§ 19. Sartre’s cogito as cornerstone of subjectivity
At this point, it perhaps becomes reasonable to raise the questions about the accuracy of Sartre’s interpretations. When it comes to Descartes, he remains mostly restrained in his critique. In the case of Husserl, it is fair to acknowledge that both his published and unpublished thematically relevant work in the time when Sartre delivered his lecture greatly surpassed – both in amount and depth – the level of sophistication that is characteristic for the way how it (Husserl’s thought) is presented by Sartre.102 For the appropriate understanding of what the author (Sartre) tries to
99 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 143.
100 Cf. LEVINAS, Emmanuel: Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. Le Livre de Poche (Paris, 2004), p. 245. This dimension of Levinas’s text has been described most famously by Paul Ricoeur. Cf.
RICOEUR, Paul: Autrement. Lecture d’« Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence » d’Emmanuel Levinas. Presses Universitaires de France (Paris, 1997). Pp. 26-36.
101 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, p. 143. This point is remarkably similar to those made by Sartre in his other well-known texts, except this time, he prescribes the execution of this argument to Husserl.
102 We can name a few of the more important ones relating to our topic at hand: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913), Formale und transzendentale Logik:
Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929), Méditations cartésiennes. Introduction à la
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express in this text, I suggest to maintain a stance similar to the one that Sartre propagates in relation to Husserl’s critique of Descartes – that is to leave the question of some definitive judgement about how it is regarding the world and the other in Husserl’s thought aside (and we shall return to this topic in following chapters). My take on the matter is that Sartre’s aim is to utilize this simplified reconstruction of both authors to set the stage in a way that would suite his critical reactions to come and obviously make this critique shine as something that corrects the weak spots of the preceding conceptions.
The passage that introduces Sartre’s own position starts with following up on phrase about the extent of certainty or uncertainty of “my empirical ego” and the other (quoted above).
Sartre generally agrees with this claim, but also shifts its focus – it is not about having a specific degree of certainty about ourselves and then prescribing the same degree of certainty to the other.
Instead, the meditating subject does not know about himself “who he is, what he stands for and what he does” and in the same manner, I do not know that about the other as well.103 However, concerning the other as a transcendental subject – which is something different than “empirical selfhood” – Sartre has a rather radical opinion stating that the other is certain in exactly the same manner as I am.104 At this very moment, Sartre finally arrives at the point when he formulates the cornerstone of his whole text and asks a question about the difference between being and cognition. In the case of Descartes, to be meant to be cognizant and in the case of Husserl, he (Sartre) finds the question of being to be bracketed (and thus avoided) indefinitely. If we, according to Sartre, begin with the statement “I think therefore I am,” then we will have in front of us a type of truth, and thus a sort of a subject-object distinction, “allowing us to proclaim, albeit abstractly or intellectually, that thinking subject exists, and that he grasps himself as such, and hence plays the role of an object for himself”.105 Simply put, we are describing an act of reflection that Sartre calls a cartesian cogito and identifies it with playing the role of cognition.
phénoménologie (1931) and Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936).
103 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 143.
104 Sartre does not elaborate this motive here further, but he nevertheless still maintains his earlier
conclusions from Being and Nothingness. The existence of the other has to be accounted for by a specific cogito. SARTRE, Jean-Paul: L'être et le néant. Gallimard (Paris, 1943), p. 290.
105 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 147.
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In principle, his task is then to figure out whether there is not a more original ground for the constitution of subjectivity then cognition can offer.106 For cognition implies conscious cognition – otherwise it would not be a cognition in the first place – and this consciousness is something radically different from the cognition itself. By performing this abstraction, Sartre is trying to filter out such consciousness that could not be identified with cognition, in other words without being reflected on. This consciousness that Sartre labels “non-thetic”, otherwise “pre- reflective” or “consciousness on first level”, is what according to him truly represents being of consciousness and is an adequate equivalent to the term cogito. Sartre claims that it is no problem to prove the existence of such states of consciousness in our everyday experience (what is more, he says that in every instant we actually are such consciousness107). The problem should lie in the question of how do we pass from this non-thetic consciousness to the reflective cognition, which serves as a foundation for itself.108 Sartre, by the way, admits that he is not the first philosopher to make these kinds of conclusions. Certain moments, albeit in not such articulated and explicit manner (but serving similar function) can be traced back into Husserl’s The lectures on internal time-consciousness.109 Dan Zahavi gathers material containng this non-thematic self- consciousness from this source, as well as from Sartre’s other early work and other Husserlian
106 The claim that Husserl offers only such self-relation which operates within the subject-object division is the main argument of a critique originating from Dieter Heinrich and recently most famously raised and elaborated by Manfred Frank. According to the latter, every relation operates with a distinction of two or more poles, which presuppose a role of mediating enabler and it the case of epistemic relationship, it opens the possibility for an error. In course of this “relationist” self-cognition, it would be impossible to conceive such a self-consciousness that could be treated as necessarily “true” without any further conditions. More about this critique and its validity can be found here: ZAHAVI, Dan: “Self-awareness and affection”, Alterity and Facticity, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi, Phaenomenologica 148, Springer (Dordrecht. 1998), pp. 204 – 222.
107 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 150.
108 SARTRE, Jean-Paul : « Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi », p. 150.
109 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins in German. HUSSERL, Edmund: The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. M. Heidegger, trans. J. S. Churchill. Indiana University Press (Bloomington, 2019).